In 2019, former president Donald Trump tweeted that he was “not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”
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That was then. Today, Trump is expected to announce the launch of World Liberty Financial, his new cryptocurrency exchange and the latest play to become the “crypto candidate” of the 2024 election.
Thus far, confirmed details about World Liberty Financial have been few. The platform’s first post on X dates back to August 25, with the caption, “It’s time to make finance great again!” Since then, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been promoting the exchange on X and, last Thursday, Trump posted his own video on X, stating, “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind.”
In that same video, Trump shared that he would go live on X Spaces today at 8 p.m. ET for World Liberty Financial’s launch. Here’s what else we know:
What is World Liberty Financial?
Little is known about how World Liberty Financial might differ from other exchanges, but, generally, a cryptocurrency exchange allows users to buy and sell digital assets, similar to traditional stocks.
Reporting from the crypto news site CoinDesk suggests that World Liberty Financial may debut with its own nontransferable governance token (a new cryptocurrency), but that hasn’t been officially confirmed.
What has Trump’s stance on crypto looked like in the past?
During his presidency, Trump was generally anti-crypto, perhaps best illustrated by his aforementioned 2019 tweet that went on to claim, “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”
However, he’s made a significant about-face on the 2024 campaign trail. Last May, Trump’s campaign started allowing supporters to donate in crypto. He has vowed to supporters that, if reelected, he would create a strategic national Bitcoin reserve. Trump reportedly owns a crypto wallet worth around $14.7 million, according to crypto analysts Arkham Intelligence. And, in June, Trump told a California campaign stop that he wants to be the “crypto president.”
For Trump, pitching himself as the 2024 crypto candidate has both financial and political upsides. Following his promises to promote the interests of those with investments in crypto, prominent names in the crypto industry, including the founders of the popular Gemini exchange, have donated to Trump’s campaign. And in an interview with Fast Company, James Angel, a faculty affiliate at Georgetown McDonough’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, said that crypto tends to have a specific appeal to a subsection of the population that shares many qualities with Trump’s followers.
“Crypto appeals to people who distrust government institutions, just like MAGA people,” Angel said. “The high price of crypto assets [also] means that crypto people have a lot of money to donate to his campaign.”
It’s important to note that, as an industry, crypto can be highly volatile. As Fast Company has reported, after Trump was found guilty of 34 counts relating to falsifying business records, the crypto community flooded the wallet they believed to be linked to him with donations. On June 5, the wallet held more than $30 million in crypto—only for its value to be halved about a week later.
Who is involved in the new exchange?
So far, it seems that all of Trump’s sons, including 18-year-old Barron, have some hand in running World Liberty Financial, according to reporting from CoinDesk, though the official leadership hasn’t been announced yet. Likewise, Trump’s own role at the exchange is a bit murky.
The platform has announced several of its advisors through its X account, including Sandy Peng, cofounder of the Ethereum scaling company Scroll; Luke Pearson, general partner at Polychain Capital; Alexei Dulub, founder of Web3 Antivirus and PixelPlus; Corey Caplan, cofounder and creator of Dolomite; and Rafael Yakobi, founder of the crypto-focused law firm The Crypto Lawyers.
This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com
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